Companies often use lifecycle management as a last ditch effort, a “Hail Mary” pass…In reality, product lifecycle management is a difficult task. The root of its difficulty lies in its proactive nature.

Companies naturally take reactive stances to their products as they move through their lifecycles, responding to ebbs and flows in profits, reacting to competition, worrying about the inevitable patent expiration. Product lifecycle management must be a proactive initiative. It must be a key organizational aspect of the company and not a burden, a positive force for profit and for the future of the business. And that’s a difficult transition.

A Baltimore federal court judge ordered six absent defendants yesterday – including one from Maryland – to shut down Internet businesses that the Federal Trade Commission claims are part of a vast $100 million “scareware” scheme that tricked more than a million people into purchasing useless security software by making them think their computers were under attack.

The companies allegedly represented themselves falsely as Internet marketers and used legitimate advertising outlets to place malicious advertisements that redirected consumers to the defendants’ Web sites.

There, screens would pop up saying a security scan had revealed harmful or illegal files and urging computer users to purchase software for $40 to fix the phony problems. In that way, the companies were able to bilk people of more than $100 million, according to the FTC.

This caught my attention because I’m just about to FedEx back my old hard drive so it can be wiped clean and reformatted. You see, I was hit by the Backdoor.Tidserv Trojan and it shut me down in about ten minutes.

As soon as my Symantec warning came up, I shut down and rebooted in safe mode. The tricky little Trojan told me (usuing its Symantec voice) that I had successfully cleaned up, but it was lying. When I started back up, I was in pop-up city. Another shut-down and scan told my computer that a Trojan was found and quarantined. Again, it was lying. What the Trojan was doing was shutting me down a little bit more each time I ran a virus scan. After about five scans, I was toast.

Lewis Carroll would’ve had a field day satirizing the re-emergence of WAFS (Wide Area File Services), a storage industry acronym with as many meanings as there are vendors offering products. Chase this particular white rabbit down its hole, and Alice the IT manager could embark on a journey at least as bizarre as her namesake’s trip to Wonderland.

I’ve been reading about WAN optimization this morning and am shaking my head at how vendors seem to be alienating would-be customers by drowning them in proprietary lingo. Dennis Drogset (Network World) did a great job breaking down the issues so I could understand them.

The issues have been that while WAN optimization products deliver real value on a link-by-link basis, they obscure end-to-end visibility so that strategic planners are left to guess at the real “before” and “after.” They are also typically housed as an appliance with, up until very recently, little interest in integration with the rest of the management community. Finally, as “cheese-stand-alone” solutions, they become costly when scaled to large enterprise environments with hundreds and sometimes thousands of remote locations.

Ok. I get it now. WAN optimization vendors are scrambling because nobody in their right mind today wants to buy into an expensive cheese-stands-alone solution.

In a typical setup, a WAN accelerator is placed at each end of a WAN link. The appliance sits on the LAN side, on the clear-text side of a VPN device and behind the firewall or Internet router, and intercepts all traffic. The traffic is compressed, sent across the WAN, decompressed by the remote accelerator and then forwarded to the destination.

There are two approaches used as seen by the routers between the accelerators. Transparent addressing shows the original client-server source and destination addresses and hides the addresses of the accelerators. Correct addressing shows the addresses of the accelerators and hides the addresses of client-server. Both approaches work. Both approaches have their pros and cons…

In a transparent addressing architecture, the monitoring tools will continue to show network usage by the original client-server addresses and port numbers. But you will not directly see the total traffic carried between the accelerators. Remember that they are masked.

With a correct addressing architecture, traffic monitoring tools will show traffic as having come from/to the acceleration appliances. In this case the client-server traffic volume is masked. However, in both cases the traffic volumes that are reported by routers or probes between the accelerators will be dramatically changed from the original true traffic as seen on the LANs.

In both cases the best solution is to move the network monitoring probes to the LAN-side of the appliance or to gather usage information directly from the appliance itself. Ongoing real-time before-and-after picture of what the accelerators is doing (like how much compression is being achieved) can only be supplied by the accelerators. So we recommend shifting traffic monitoring to the appliance. That way you get same accurate data from either approach.

Remember the word “spintronics” as you may be hearing more and more about it over the coming months. It’s basically a phenomenon that creates magnetic currents that behave much in the same way that electric currents work, except with out all the heat that electric currents generate.

Lots of buzz about spintronics since Eiji Saitoh of Keio University in Yokohama, Japan, published an article in Nature about a phenomenon called the spin Seebrook effect. Potentially, spintronic devices would store information magnetically and use magnetism for battery power. (Magnets don’t have waste heat. If scientists can reduce waste heat, it could also help with computer chip miniaturization, lower power consumption and improve speed.)

All spintronic devices act according to the simple scheme: (1) information is stored (written) into spins as a particular spin orientation (up or down), (2) the spins, being attached to mobile electrons, carry the information along a wire, and (3) the information is read at a terminal. pin orientation of conduction electrons survives for a relatively long time (nanoseconds, compared to tens of femtoseconds during which electron momentum decays), which makes spintronic devices particularly attractive for memory storage and magnetic sensors applications, and, potentially for quantum computing where electron spin would represent a bit (called qubit) of information.

Magnetoelectronics, Spin Electronics, and Spintronics are different names for the same thing: the use of electrons’ spins (not just their electrical charge) in information circuits.

Stanley Litow, quoting a commenter after the launch of the World Community Grid

I’m proud to help spread the news that IBM is backing a distributed grid supercomputer called the World Community Grid. As I write this, over 413,000 members volunteering 1.2 million computers are harnessing their idle computing power to help scientists working on humanitarian causes. The really interesting part is that this initiative will create kind of a hybrid supercomputer and once again change the definition of “the cloud.” (IBM piloted the program on their internal cloud and then extended out the grid to individual computer users.)

To become of member of World Community Grid and donate your idle processing power so scientists can find a cure for AIDS, develop more efficient solar panels or help humanity in some other useful way, all you have to do is sign up www.worldcommunitygrid.org. You’ll be asked to install a small software which will allow your computer to request work from the World Community Grid’s server. After the work has been completed, your computer will send the results back to the WCG server and ask it for a new piece of work. A screen saver will tell you when your computer is busy being a supercomputer.

…The World Community Grid is running at an average of 179 Teraflops, roughly equivalent to the 11th most powerful supercomputer on earth. (The current heavyweight, IBM’s Roadrunner, runs at more than 1 Petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.)

The quote above comes from the article IBM and Harvard Tap World Community Grid
by David Gelles. Litow, IBM VP for corporate citizenship and affairs, was referring to another grid computing initiative called SETI@home. SETI is an abbreviation for “search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.”

About This Blog

Overheard in the tech blogosphere is like an impressionist painting about information technology. Close up, it’s just a bunch of colorful quotes. Take a step back and look at all the posts together — and you begin to see a picture.